This blog is an exploration of life purpose -- why we are here; what matters. It examines the spiritual tasks and truths that help us navigate, to do what we came here to do. Despite our amnesia. Despite pain and fear and loss. In the garden of shadow and light we cling to the day and lose it. This blog is about seeing through the dark.

Thursday, January 30, 2014

From the first day of life there is one plan for us -- to learn. We learn from breaking; from feeling lost, untethered to the "whole."

The dark comes, early or late. We learn from walking in it, knowing the morning will not come again in this life. The plan was to learn by breaking -- the pain held, carried this long way by some ferocious miracle.

Hell was invented by priests to earn power over the flock. The devil is no more real than dragons or gargoyles. Yet while Dante's mythical inferno was scaring Christians back to church, the spiritual disease that makes hell on earth was a runaway plague in Europe. That disease is the belief in good and evil. It is the dense and heavy fabric of judgment, separating souls from each other. And locking them in a prison of anger, contempt, and violence. Judgment dehumanizes; strips souls of beauty and worth. Right-wrong, worthy-unworthy -- each judgment is a brick in the walls of our own self-made Hades.

Accessing deep wisdom, gathered over many lifetimes, is a spiritual skill. It involves listening to atman -- the part of our soul that remains in the spirit world during each incarnation. Each choice -- even early in life -- is made either by listening or not listening.

Listening starts with waiting, and not acting. Waiting for the impulse -- whatever it is -- to pass. Waiting to see what lies behind each drive -- the fear or the desire. At the moment of impulse, we access atman by entering the quiet place, the wise place. Letting the feeling rise and fall. Listening for the whisper of what we have always known.